The Comeback Kid
by meyerlemon
Summary: Coming home to the Galactica isn’t nearly as much fun as she was hoping for.


Kara lost her virginity to Helo when he still went by plain old Karl. But then, he lost his to her, so it kind of balances out.

They were both barely nineteen, both shocked that they'd actually made it this far, to pilot training, and they didn't have time or drive left over for the dates their classmates went on. They had similar family backgrounds, and neither of them got much mail. For some reason Karl was blithely cheerful, though. Kara was sharp and a little mean.

They first had sex on the floor of Karl's room when his roommate was home for Janus. Afterward, Karl gave her a little leather-bound journal.

"Because you can't talk to me," he said. Kara argued with him, out of habit, that she could talk to him just _fine_, and then she distracted him by climbing on top of him.

Lee was famous before he even showed up, poor guy. Being one of Husker's kids couldn't have been easy. Kara doesn't know what it's like to be expected to succeed, but she suspects that in some ways, it's harder than being expected to fail. At least every time she aces a test or scores a hundred on her flight quals, she gets that little kick of victory. When Lee succeeds, it's no more than his dad expects.

He's kind of uptight when she first meets him, but he mellows out when you get some liquor into him, which they do, in Karl's room, with booze they smuggled in from town.

Lee is slow to pick up on her and Karl, but then it's not like they're broadcasting it. He coughs on the cheap ambrosia when he sees Karl's hand on her knee, and excuses himself almost immediately.

Thoughtfully, Kara watches him walk away, and almost doesn't notice Karl nuzzling at her neck.

The next day, Lee is brightly cheerful to her, and Kara slowly understands. Three years later, when she meets his little brother, she mostly thinks about the look on Lee's face when Karl's hand slid up her leg. Kara's not the most introspective person, and she gets to be very good at not thinking about things.

On Caprica, Kara sits by the small, smokeless fire Helo built and Sharon keeps going. The three of them haven't spoken to each other for hours.

There are a lot of things Kara wants to say to Helo, but none of them are fair. If she'd been stuck on a dying world with the one person she wanted over all others, would she have resisted?

She closes her eyes and imagines Lee's hand on her knee, and shivers.

"Night," she says, and curls up as best she can under the emergency blanket. Across the fire, she knows that Helo is looking at Sharon when he thinks she's not looking. Kara has given up calling her "The Cylon". For better or for worse, she's pretty sure this is the same person she played a thousand late-night hands of cards with.

That doesn't mean she wants to kill her any less.

Her thoughts drift as she drops off. And, as always, they drift to one person.

When Lee freaked out at her for sleeping with Baltar, she couldn't bring herself to tell him that Baltar was the fourth man she's slept with. Kara knows for an absolute fact that Lee slept with four girls his first semester at the Academy alone.

There was Karl. Then there was Zak. After Zak died, there was one night with a major from Saggitaron, a man she selected because he was there, and because she needed to mark her skin with another man's hands for just one moment, and mostly because Lee wouldn't touch her, no matter how drunk he got.

And then there was Baltar. It's not much of a line-up. Kara promises herself that if she ever gets back to the Galactica, she's going to look Lee up and point out that he has no place calling her a slut with a track record as dismal as that. And then she'll probably punch him.

That thought, more than the fire, warms Kara enough to sleep.

Coming home to the Galactica isn't nearly as much fun as she was hoping for. Not only did the three of them barely have enough oxygen to make the jump back, they almost got shot down coming in, and then she got thrown in the brig. She doesn't know what happened to Sharon or Helo.

No one will tell her anything. No one comes to visit. She doesn't expect the old man, and she didn't think the President would risk it, but somehow she thought maybe Lee would show up.

He doesn't. For nine cycles the guards ignore her and after a while, she stops asking questions.

On the tenth day, the Galactica starts shaking with impact, and Tigh comes to see her. He looks worse than she's ever seen him. She'd think he was drinking again, but no drunk could look that haunted.

"Starbuck," he says, and he even sounds tired, "I need you in a Viper. Can you fly?"

"Yes, sir," she replies. Her voice is scratchy from disuse.

"Will you frak this up?" He asks, in exactly the same tone.

"No, sir," she replies, and Tigh looks at her for a moment. He nods at the guards, and they open her cell.

On the flight deck, she sees Lee for the first time. Like her, he is delivered to his Viper by two armed guards, and she frowns. They're too far away for conversation, but Lee raises a hand.

When her helmet goes on and the comm system boots up, she hears his voice in her headset immediately.

"Good to have you back, Starbuck."

Kara remembers fights and punches thrown and offers declined in bars on now-dead planets, and vengeful thoughts had by firelight, and she wonders why the frak Lee is being followed around by Marines, but in the end, she says nothing.

Dualla's voice comes over the comm.

"Good hunting, Starbuck. Good hunting, Apollo."

_Time to save the world_, Kara thinks, and then tubes hurl her into a fight so intense she understands why Tigh was reduced to finding pilots in the brig.

Evading a pack of Raiders, she remembers that she never answered.

"Good to be back, Lee," she says, even though it might not be true, and even though he probably can't hear her. "Good to be back."

fin


End file.
